Collectable

The artist who foresaw contemporary visuality

Remembering Dara Birnbaum

Dara Birnbaum (1946–2025) was one of the first artists to grasp, as early as the 1970s, the disciplinary and unidirectional power that the mass media can exert over people. She developed a working method that created a trend: mixing up existent media material by separating the sound from the image, altering the sequences and re-editing it, thus freeing it from the original narratives. A way of exposing the hidden politics of the mass media that are often kept from most viewers. While video as a language is now part of the canon of art, when Birnbaum began working as an artist it was practically non-existent. In the art and film magazines she would buy with money earned by working as a waitress, there was no mention of television. So, she decided to do it, becoming her ‘rebellion’, as she liked to say.

Among different works by Birnbaum, the MACBA Collection owns one of her early video works, Attack Piece, 1975. Filmed with super-8 and 35 mm cameras facing each other, the result is an effective, yet disturbing installation about what it means to be an active viewer and who can be one. In an Art in America interview with curator Lauren Cornell, who would later organise the artist’s first US retrospective in 2022, Birnbaum said, ‘I’d like to create a space for viewing and reflection that doesn’t usually occur within this society, especially through mass media’. Today we remember Dara Birnbaum.